Willing to Offend

I’d call it a sabbatical, but technically a sabbatical is capped at a year. You know things are bad when you’ve passed a hat trick of sabbaticals.

The funny thing is that I never made a conscious decision to stop writing. My blogs had over a million visitors and growing. Things were wonderful. My hands just slowed. I found reasons to avoid putting in the time. My excuses drifted to days, and weeks, and months, and *BAMF* I used to have a blog.

Looking back though I can see clearly what stopped me.

The web has wonderful islands of independent thought. But these islands are surrounded by an ocean of regurgitated opinion. Experience stands at equal shoulder to passing fancy online. The waves lap at the fringes of every island, nipping at the bits and pieces that aren’t hammered down, sucking them into themselves. Marketing teams know this and splash like children in the kiddie pool. As we’re all piloting this rough terrain (on our own makeshift vessels), it is easy to begin to mistake the waves for equally solid ground.

Ultimately, the web is the great averager of ideas. While the spectrum of opinions is infinite, so is the number of posts that one would need to consume to find a fresh thought. Bad ideas are surely set to drown out the good. It is this feeling that infected my worldview.

But I’m fucking tired of trying to placate the waves.

Sometimes people have shitty ideas that don’t deserve your time. Sometimes someone’s best doesn’t cut it. And sometimes trying not to offend causes more harm than good. Finding this opinion has had some really amazing consequences, including getting banned from almost every major social media site (more on that later).